Graduate Education

Questions about choosing a major are almost always misguided.
In the first place, most schools in the United States do not require you to declare your major on your application, or even in your first year of college. If you are applying for a bachelor of science degree instead of a bachelor of arts degree, you may find that if you don't take certain prerequisites in your first year, you will find it difficult to graduate within four years; but you can take those prerequisites without declaring your major, and change your mind to an easier major later.

In the second place, at the undergraduate level, there is almost no way to determine that one program is markedly better than another, except for the quality of the schools themselves. Liberal arts colleges are more likely to have better history and philosophy departments than technical colleges may. Top schools that have Nobel prize-winning professors for the graduate level are likely to also have good undergraduate programs, especially since there is often a point where seniors are allowed to take graduate-level courses.

But there's another point where history is history, and no accredited school can teach that the Confederacy won the Civil War; neither can any school teach that Plato was "better than" Aristotle; each are great for their place in the development of philosophy as well as for their individual philosophies.

The biggest division in choosing undergraduate institutions is whether those schools are liberal arts colleges or technical institutions, or in many cases a combination of both. A school like Dartmouth is almost entirely focused on the liberal arts, while a school like Perdue is going to be much more heavily focused on the STEM subjects. And schools like Penn, Columbia, even Harvard and MIT, work very hard at being equally good in technical subjects and did liberal arts subjects.